Photzy

HOW TO USE LAYERING AND FOREGROUND

INTEREST IN LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY
Quick Guide
Written by Robin Nichols

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 I usually ask all students coming through my photo classes
about what subjects they like to shoot. Interestingly, I can
almost predict what people are going to tell me before they
reply: new mothers are obviously keen on getting great snaps
of their family; younger students exhibit enthusiasm for street
photography; and of course everyone travels these days, so a
record of trips and vacations comes pretty high on the list. But
that said, I think landscape photography probably still tops the
list of responses.

Why so? I suspect it has something to do with the fact that

landscapes are just ‘there,’ and to the uninitiated they are easy
to capture. All you have to do is point and shoot, right?

David Bailey, a revolutionary fashion and social photographer

from the ‘60s, famously said, “It takes a lot of imagination to be
a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter
Photograph by Robin Nichols
because you can invent things. But in photography everything is
One of my favorite shots taken in Kenya with the massive bulk of Mt Kilimanjaro in the distance.
so ordinary, it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the
Weather controls much in the life of the landscape photographer. We can’t control it, so we have
to be patient, returning to the desired spot again and again until the light is ‘right.’ After several extraordinary…”.
days of heavy cloud cover, Kilimanjaro revealed itself for ten minutes and was then lost again.
Wise words, I think. Genres such as people and street
photography are more challenging because you have to
deal with the public – people who may or may not want to be
photographed. It can get tricky. Regarding animals and babies,
well we know what W. C Fields had to say on this topic, “…
never work with children or animals…,” so I guess that leaves
landscapes.

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 What I’d like to share with you in this guide is how to fine-tune
your landscape shooting prowess by using a simple technique
called layering. Now, don’t panic; this has nothing to do with
layers in Photoshop, although you certainly can use software
layers to help enhance what was originally captured. But more
on that later.

Landscapes are certainly very popular, but even though

everyone travels to beautiful places, I still see a lot of very
uninspiring work from quite seasoned photographers. Let’s have
a look at why this might be so.

When your landscape photos don’t work, when they look

distinctly underwhelming, it’s likely because the result presented
was shot in poor light. But it’s equally likely that it has no clear
foreground or middle ground. In fact, the least interesting
landscapes I see are those where the entire composition
Image by Robin Nichols
contains nothing but background – and by that I mean distant
Breaking this landscape down into its component layers, there’s clearly
features.
a foreground, middle-to-distant region, and the cloudy sky region. It’s
reasonably interesting but fundamentally lacks foreground interest.
Now that’s all good and well if you plan on printing the image
to poster size or larger, but most of us don’t do that, so it’s
important to include both foreground and middle ground details
to bring a sense of depth and dimension to our work.

When you consider layering in landscape photography, we learn

to look for a scene that has these distinct areas: foreground,
middle ground, and far distance or background.

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 What you’ll learn in this guide:

·· Identify the layered parts of any

potential scene

·· Use leading lines

·· Frame tonal layers

·· Develop post-processing tips

·· Plus: recommended landscape

lenses

Recommended Resource: If
you’d like to learn more and improve
your landscape photography, grab a
copy of Photzy’s best-selling
premium guide: Complete
Landscape Photography.

Photograph by Robin Nichols

Someone was obviously listening to my silent pleas for something ‘interesting’ in the front of the shot because along came
a cranky old bull elephant, which just hung about between the mountain and me. This is an example of perfect timing:
the right place at the right time. This is an unedited file. Take a look at the final edited version at the end of this guide
to see how a bit of gentle software manipulation on these layers can radically improve what’s already there.

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 Image by Robin Nichols

This image displays a new layer sketch, which is now dividing the scene into four main areas. See the final edited version at the end of this guide.

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 WHERE ARE WE GOING WRONG?

Anyone who has shot a big scene with a single image or by

stitching a panorama together will undoubtedly agree that
shooting them is easy enough, but landscapes are very hard to
make interesting, even if the place you are shooting is beautiful.
This is especially true when shooting a panorama.

Think about it. The process of adding more detail to the left and
right of the subject, as one does with a wide format panorama,
tends to make the subject appear even more distant. But don’t
take my word for it; open up some of your landscapes and check
out the main subject and ask yourself if it’s dominant or distant.

In my experience most tend to be distant, often with a lot of

Photograph by Robin Nichols
nothing very special in the foreground. Inevitably we get too
taken up by the subject: the tall mountain range, a sweeping
I was definitely in the right place, above an incredibly steep gorge in Ethiopia’s
Simien Mountains, but the light wasn’t right and there was NO foreground simply coastline, or a city skyline at night. We completely forget to fill
because there was nothing there! The edge of the road fell away into the gorge. I even other parts of the frame with interesting subject matter.
tried shooting three bracketed frames to see if creating an HDR image might help.
It certainly reveals more detail in the shadow areas, but it’s still a bit boring. Let me explain a bit more. I see hundreds of landscapes that
are snapped, from across a river, over a fence, off the back of
a ferry, out of a car window, or from across a freeway, and in
these you’ll see that only 40% or 50% of the image content is
really interesting. This interest inevitably sits in the middle or
far distance and is surrounded by a sea of uninteresting details:
choppy water, desert scrub, indistinct fields – that kind of thing.

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 Photograph by Robin Nichols

Same location, just a bit further up the track. We were on a guided walk with these three charming fellows. While the rest of the group took snaps of the
distant mountains, I asked the three if it was OK for me to take a portrait (always a good policy if they are the ones holding the weapons!). As a point of
foreground interest, it works well because it puts the scene into some form of context – that foreigners can’t travel anywhere in this country without the need
for one or more guides, which was fine with us because they knew the land and it provided them with an additional income. And besides, I got the shot.

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 What these images need is a strong
visual foreground, a point of focus –
something for the eye to lock on to. This
has the effect of breaking up the endless
monotony of a far-off subject. It’s like
any good composition: ‘simple’ images
usually work a whole lot better than those
that have everything crammed into the
one frame, where a viewer can be so
easily overwhelmed with both relevant
and irrelevant details.

Photograph by Robin Nichols

Sometimes it’s a good idea to shoot scenes like this even though there’s no clear foreground interest present. It’s
not because they make fantastic landscapes – although the layers in this example are about as clear as you could
possibly want (clearly sunset is a beautiful time of day), but I also see images such as this having the perfect mix of
photographic detail and space, areas over which I can add text for a photo book (see next illustration).

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 Photograph by Robin Nichols

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 LAYERED FEATURES: WHAT TO LOOK FOR

So, point one is to try and include foreground interest. This is

your first layer.

It might be something on the river bank where you are standing;

it might be a gnarled, dead tree, an animal, a patch of colorful
flowers, or a canoe pulled up on the shore. Almost anything will
do. The more colorful, textured, or unusual, the better.

Behind this is your mid-ground which can act as the second

layer with which to frame the content. This could be a lake, a
river, a highway, or a just a forest path that forms a natural band
across the composition, separating the immediate foreground
from the distance.
Photograph by Robin Nichols

In a rather obvious example of a leading line, the sinuous road easily carves a
Besides identifying layers in a landscape, you can also include
pathway through this Icelandic landscape, pulling the eye into the frame from leading lines. These work in much the same way that was used
the right-hand side and exiting at the top left-hand side of the frame. by landscape painters such as J. M. W. Turner, John Constable,
Camille Pissaro, Claude Monet, and Vincent van Gogh, to name
a few.

Painters would add a feature like a path or river that was used
compositionally to lead the viewer’s eyes through the relevant
parts of the image construction; the foreground, the middle
ground, and the background.

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 The humble photographer, however, must learn to ground layers, it should improve the interest level
discover these lines in the landscape and use the significantly. And if the climate and time of day is also
focal length to crop the composition so as to arrange working in your favor, your results should improve
such lines to your benefit. Sometimes it’s just not dramatically.
going to work, sometimes it does. Above all, the trick
is in learning to look and see. But as David Bailey told us back in the ‘60s, “If you
are not looking, you won’t see.”
Having isolated a foreground and a middle layer,
the background layer can usually then be the city, Recommended Resource: If you’d like to
the mountain range, the interesting rock formation, learn more and improve your landscape
or whatever attracted you to the place in the first photography, grab a copy of Photzy’s bestselling
instance. premium guide: Complete Landscape
If this is shot in the right light at the right angle Photography.
and with attention to the foreground and mid-

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 TECHNIQUES FOR LANDSCAPE LAYERING

As already mentioned, the time of day, angle of the sun, and

the weather all play a vital part in helping you to emphasize a
layered result.

Shooting early on, or at the end of the day, helps exponentially

to emphasize the depth of any scene simply because things near
to you appear clear, while distant objects, such as ridges and
landmasses, tend to fade the further away they are.

Good weather also helps in making, or breaking, a landscape.

By ‘good weather’ I don’t mean perfect blue skies; quite the
opposite. A nice stormy sky opens up another dimension to
your landscape composition, adding tension, visual drama, and
Photograph by Robin Nichols
yet another layer above and behind the middle and far distance
This is another landscape photograph from Iceland. In this example I was contemplating shooting
layers.
a panorama to illustrate the bleakness of the land, when suddenly the distant cloud cleared
revealing a much higher mountain in the far distance. I was in the right place at the right time. Once identified, landscape layers can be enhanced using simple
In post-production I used the Dodge and Burn brushes to help separate the layers: the darkness software techniques (see page 16).
in the immediate foreground from the mid-ground ridges, and the distant high peaks.
Choice of lens is very important. I get asked all the time what
the ‘best’ lens for landscapes is. It’s a hard one to answer
because there are ‘small landscapes’ as well as massive
panoramas. Generally, I’d recommend a 24mm wide-angle lens.
If you are shooting with an APS-C-type camera, then a lens with
an 18mm focal length, or wider, might be best.

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 I use a Canon EF17-40mm lens on my full-
frame body and an EF-S 10-22mm lens on
my APS-C camera body (this is equivalent
to a 15-33mm focal length on a full-
frame camera). I have also used a 300mm
lens on occasion, which has the effect of
compressing the layers closer together
(see the shot of Namibian sand dunes on
the next page).

Depth of field is also a feature worth

considering. As a general rule, landscape
photographers prefer to shoot using the
maximum depth of field. They will choose
f22 as a default aperture, even taking
care to manually focus one third of the
distance into the scene to maximize the
depth of field (DOF). This is a technique
called Hyperfocal Distance, where the
Image by Robin Nichols
DOF always falls one third in front of
A breakdown of the layers in this Icelandic landscape image. the point of focus (POF) and two thirds
behind the POF.

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 Stability is another important
consideration. ISO 100 with a small
aperture produces a long exposure;
therefore there’s a strong possibility of
camera shake. So pack a tripod, and
an electronic cable release. This is
especially important if you further reduce
the amount of light getting into the
camera through the use of use of special
effects filters.

I’d recommend the use of a Polarising

filter. Depending on the angle of the
light on the scene, you’ll find these FX
filters don’t always work, but when they
do, the added punch to blue skies and
green foliage that they produce can be
quite impressive.

I also recommend the use of Neutral

Density (ND) filters whenever shooting
around water. Typically ND filters cut
Photograph by Robin Nichols out up to 10 exposure steps of light
This image is another landscape example where the distant layer, this massive Namibian sand dune, forms the backdrop for its (depending on the type of ND filter you
smaller cousin, adding an immediate sense of scale and texture to the scene. Interestingly, the layers here are also cleanly divided use), which forces the camera to expose
into dark shadow, smooth sand textures, and a knobbly textured background. All that was required in post-production was to
darken the right-hand shadow area and increase the contrast in the background to emphasize its texture. I shot this using a
for a long time. This has the effect of
300mm telephoto lens to compress the distance between the foreground and the background details (Canon EF 300mm lens). making rough water appear frozen and
produces that wonderful smoky waterfall
effect. Again, a tripod is a must.

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 Photograph by Robin Nichols

Climate and time of day plays a vital role in a photographer’s creative palette. At any time, other than early morning or, as recorded
here, late afternoon, this scene would not be worth shooting other than as a record of the place.

With the setting sun and a lot of atmospheric dust, the color of the sky intensifies and the ridges of the Simien Mountains in
Northern Ethiopia stand out as magnificent layers that fade into the distance.

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 POST-PRODUCTION
TECHNIQUES

Software can be used to emphasize

layering in a landscape. I personally
recommend using the Dodge and Burn
tools. You’ll find these handy ‘brushes’
in most good-quality photo editing
applications.

These tools give the photographer the

ability to brush more or less density into
specific tonal areas in the image. For
example, with the Dodge brush you can
‘paint’ the highlights a bit brighter or
lift the density of the mid-tones. With
the Burn brush you can darken the mid-
tones, shadows, or highlights individually,
all without the need for any complex
selections or masking. Providing you go
Photograph by Robin Nichols
slowly, it is easy enough to do.
Here’s the final version of the bull elephant and Kilimanjaro picture. I added some saturation and shadow density into the I consider these to be one of software’s
foreground and darkened the mid-ground, which in turn emphasized the mountain peeking out of the cloud cover.
hero tools because they can be so
effective at bringing out detail in the
landscape layers with little or no prior
practice.

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 Another tool that’s particularly good for emphasizing where it turns black and white, just enough to knock
color in landscapes is the Sponge tool. Like the Burn back the saturation to make that distraction blend
and Dodge brushes, this tool is easy to use (again, it into the background.
works best when set to a low speed) and enhances
color that’s already in the scene. Slowly, slowly works Recommended Resource: If you’d like to
best. learn more and improve your landscape
Set it to reverse to reduce the color values in a scene. photography, grab a copy of Photzy’s bestselling
This is a particularly good technique for dimming premium guide: Complete Landscape
down colors that distract attention from the main Photography.
subject. You don’t reduce the color to the point

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 ABOUT THE AUTHOR Congratulations! You’ve completed
this Photzy guide!

Robin Nichols is a UK-born If you liked this landscape photography

photographer. He has spent the tutorial, check out this premium guide to
past 30 years in Sydney, Australia, help you transform your landscape snapshots
where he began work as a into beautiful scenic works of art: The
cameraman, then as a freelance Complete Landscape Photography Guide.
photographer.

He worked as a freelance writer

and then as a magazine editor for
several photography publications
for more than eight years. He also
ran his own publishing business,
producing two specialist magazines
- Better Photoshop Techniques and
Better Digital Camera magazine.

Aside from conducting photo tours and workshops, Robin

teaches photography, video, and post-processing classes
through the Centre for Continuing Education at Sydney
University.

His work can be seen online at IF YOU’D LIKE TO CONTINUE

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